Wine lovers beating a path to CellarTracker

LettieTeague

What if there were a way to keep track of your wine cellar and the wines you’re drinking — and the wines your friends are drinking as well? And what if you could browse the contents of their cellars and even read their tasting notes — in addition to tasting notes written by the pros?

Wendy Macnaughton/Wall Street Journal

Those are just a few of the features of CellarTracker, an eight-year-old website, cellar-software system and chat forum that has become one of the most popular Internet sites for wine collectors and casual drinkers alike. According to CellarTracker founder Eric LeVine, about half a million people visit the website each month — rising to about three-quarters of a million in the winter months.

CellarTracker began almost accidentally, said LeVine, a wine collector and former Microsoft employee who retired from the company
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in 2004 at 34. A couple of years earlier, LeVine had decided to create a software system to keep track of his wine cellar. His early design was “pretty rudimentary,” by his own admission, but when he showed it to a few collector friends, they wanted to use it as well. (Most were using a laborious spreadsheet program or a cellar book written by hand.) LeVine didn’t have outsize expectations about his system; he hoped for a few hundred fellow note-takers at most. “I personally couldn’t imagine a smaller niche category,” he said.

But it’s a niche product that has gone mainstream. In fact, odds are that if you Google the name of almost any wine, one of the first links that pops up will be a CellarTracker review. There are more than 230,000 registered CellarTrackers, able to post tasting notes that anyone can read, and the database of CellarTracker notes is one of the largest in the world — around 2.8 million at the time of this writing.

Where wine enthusiasts meet online

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Amateur and professional wine enthusiasts often turn to one website, CellarTracker.com, to review tasting notes, chat about vintages and keep track of their own collections.

Along with the tasting notes written by CellarTrackers, there are also some 400,000 notes by professional wine critics, including Steve Tanzer and Allen Meadows (a.k.a. “the Burghound”), with whom Levine has negotiated access. A big missing name is critic Robert M. Parker Jr., whom LeVine still hopes will one day join his site. Parker told me that he had no plans to join LeVine’s “conglomerate,” and that the CellarTracker business model is totally different from that of his eRobertParker.com site.

Parker’s site includes no amateur tasting notes, and the pricing structures differ as well. ERobertParker subscribers pay a flat $99 rate for access to the website and Wine Advocate information and scores, while CellarTrackers are asked to “contribute” a certain amount according to the size of their cellar, ranging from $36 to $150 (for 1,000 bottles and up) a year.

An enormous number of those notes are written by one member: Richard Jennings, a human-resources executive based in Mountain View, Calif. Jennings estimated he has written about 30,000 CellarTracker tasting notes — despite holding down a full-time job. How does he have the time to taste all that wine, let alone write the notes? There are lunch breaks, vacations and his “very competent staff” to handle work when he’s away from the office, said Jennings, who estimates he writes 25 to 30 notes a day. “I find writing tasting notes to be relaxing,” said Jennings. He said he tastes “around 7,000 wines a year,” and though he contributes his notes free, he said he has been talking with LeVine about possible compensation. “Nothing specific is planned right now,” LeVine said, but he’s “not opposed to it in principle.”

Jennings has become so well known in wine circles that his opinions — and his notes — are often mentioned on other chat forums—although recent posts on WineBerserkers (a popular wine forum) took Jennings to task for what were regarded as too-brief notes on a bunch of Oregon wines. (Jennings on the Argyle Brut Rosé: “Light pink color with few medium bubbles; pear nose; ripe pear, tart cherry palate; medium-plus finish 89 pts.”)

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